Category Archives: Energy

Dynegy, an electricity supply company, is the vetted supplier for the first two years of Acton Power Choice (APC) — the new municipal electricity bulk purchasing program that started in Fall 2017. For any Acton electricity user who hasn’t opted out or chosen an alternate electricity supplier, Dynegy will become the electricity supplier listed on your Eversource electricity bill.

APC offers two choices: the automatic enrollment in Acton Power Choice Standard, and the “opt up” choice of Acton Power Choice GREEN. You can read more about Acton Power Choice at ActonPowerChoice.com.

Green Acton is especially excited about the APC GREEN option, by which any Acton electricity user can choose 100% renewably sourced, New England energy for only 2 cents more per kWh than the APC standard pricing. Green Acton strongly encourages those who can to “opt up” to APC GREEN. Opt up by calling 1.866.220.5696 with your Eversource account number at the ready.

This chart, which offers some sample comparative costs, may be helpful; APC prices are accurate through September 2019, and Eversource prices until January 2018.

If you didn’t, either you are not an Acton Eversource customer, or you chose an electricity supplier some time ago that isn’t Eversource. If you don’t remember getting this letter, but you want to participate in Acton Power Choice, get a recent electric bill so you can have your customer number ready and call Acton Power Choice customer support at 1-844-379-9933 and they can get you sorted out.

Here’s what the letter inside looked like (click for a larger version)

The Town and Green Acton are preparing various explanatory materials, but if you have been following along and are ready to get 100% renewable power for less than 2 cents more per kWh, you can grab your electric bill, call 1-866-220-5696 and ask to be signed up for Acton Power Choice Green.

As a summary, the Acton Power Choice program will bring to most electricity customers in Acton a new set of choices for their electricity supply. The Town, in collaboration with Peregrine Energy Group (and a dash of influence from Green Acton), designed the program and put out an RFP (Request for Proposals) for companies interested in becoming the program’s electricity supplier. Acton Power Choice will offer two options to local electricity users.

Seven companies bid for Acton’s contract. The chosen bidder was Dynegy; the initial contract period will be 24 months, after which time the Town can create a new contract that’s most advantageous. The design of Acton’s program offers two electricity sourcing options.

(1) The “default” option will feature an additional 5% Class I Massachusetts RECs on top of the mandatory Massachusetts RPS (Renewable Portfolio Standard, which is scheduled to go up by 1% each year) 12% Class I MA RECs , for a total of 17% renewable sourcing in 2017. Pricing for this “default” option will be 10.720 cents / kWh. Customers would pay this amount plus the usual delivery charge and monthly fixed fee. The Eversource basic rate, starting July 1, will be 10.759 cents / kWh. This means that the default Acton Power Choice rate will be less than the Eversource rate — even the summer rate (which is typically lower than the wintertime rate). So: significantly more renewable sourcing than the Eversource offering, and cheaper!

(2) There will also be a 100% renewable (“green”) option. This will be built with 100% Class I MA RECs and priced at 12.7 cents/ kWh, just under 2 cents more than both the default price and the Eversource price. As Green Acton works with Peregrine, we will have a lot more information with which to explain the program and calculate potential electric bills under both the default plan and the 100% green plan. Green Acton expects to have an important role in explaining and encouraging people to sign up for the 100% green option. Peregrine and Town staff are starting to work on the roll-out, and are currently estimating on a start date of late September or early October.

During the past few months, some people have been receiving misleading snail mail letters, email offers, and phone solicitations about renewable electricity that may look (or sound) like they are from some vaguely official-sounding agency. The official notices about the real Acton Power Choice program won’t be going out until late summer or early fall.

Green Acton is very excited about Acton Power Choice! We will be sharing information on the program, and will be sure to post the official letters about the program on the Green Acton website.

The Home Energy Efficiency Team (HEET) worked with the Metropolitan Area Planning Committee (MAPC) to survey 15 miles of roads in each of 15 towns, including Acton, and worked on preparing a “best practices” report on getting these leaks fixed. The report is here at this link to fixourpipes.org

The survey work was completed in 2016. Green Acton obtained a copy of the leak information via a Public Records request. The spreadsheet on leaks is here.

They found 58 underground leaks of methane (“natural”) gas. Some were quite large: Five on Prospect street were larger than 5,000 square feet.

Thanks for having us back to help start your conversation about natural gas use in Acton. There are a lot of health and safety reasons for reducing the use of natural gas, but tonight we want to focus on another reason: Climate Change.

A quick refresher: the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere is the result of many forces, including the effects shown in this diagram. When the energy coming into our atmosphere matches the energy going out, Earth’s energy is in balance. What comes in is largely visible light. What radiates away from Earth is mostly heat in the form of infrared waves. When we add additional infrared-blocking gases — greenhouse gases — to the atmosphere, more energy gets trapped, and things heat up. This is why methane, the main ingredient of natural gas, is such a problem.

Here’s an infrared photo of the gas leak at Porter Ranch in California last year. The black cloud is methane, which is opaque, and thus, blocks infrared heat waves from escaping our atmosphere. That’s why it’s such a problematic global warming gas. The International Panel on Climate Change rates methane as having more than 80 times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

Methane leaks into the air during every stage of natural gas processing, from the original drilling to its delivery under the streets of Acton. How much methane leaks? We don’t know. This diagram shows recent EPA estimates, along with the mostly higher estimates of other independent studies. At many of these estimated leak levels, natural gas used for home heating has an even larger global warming impact than coal or oil.

Climate change is a complex process, with many contributing and interacting factors. This chart shows only a few of these factors, but it’s already too complex to go into all the details tonight. I just want to highlight two of the many types of causal loops.

In blue, we’re highlighting one “negative” or “control” feedback loop. The loop shows the way that increasing CO2 increases the growth of some forests, which causes more CO2 to be absorbed from the atmosphere, which then causes lowered CO2. This acts to keep climate change under control.

In red, we’re highlighting one “positive” or “reinforcing” loop. This loop shows increasing temperatures causing more sea ice to melt, which increases the extent of open water, which reduces the reflection of energy back into space, which causes the water and air to heat up even more. This acts to reinforce climate change.

It’s been very difficult for scientists to predict when the positive feedback loops will start to dominate over the negative feedback loops. When that happens, there can be a rapid increase in global warming. We may have entered such a period recently.

One of the positive feedbacks seems recently to have entered a scary new phase, in which both Arctic and Antarctic ice extent are shrinking at the same time. That’s especially strange for the Arctic; with winter coming on in the northern hemisphere, normally the extent of sea ice would be growing quickly rather than shrinking.

Here’s more evidence of a possible shift to a period of rapid change. After a slower rate of rise in average temperatures over the last few decades, each of the last 12 months has seen higher average global temperatures than ever before in the era of modern record-keeping. The red line on top shows those temps. Record-breaking high temperatures are now happening more than 20 times as often as record-breaking low temperatures. And the harmful effects are real.

High temps in Pakistan in 2015 caused more than 1,200 deaths. This photo shows a worker creating new mass graves in anticipation of the next round of heat waves. We’ve hit the era of anticipatory mass graves.

We need to do what we can to stop the use of fossil fuels, the main source of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. How much do we need to do, and by when?

Because of the difficulties in predicting the details of how climate will actually change, different kinds of targets have been set out in scientific papers and in our laws and treaties. Achieving any of these targets would involve large-scale changes starting now. We don’t know precisely how much we need to do, but we know that the scale of the effort will need to be very large, so we all need to do what we can as soon as we can.

So, what can we do here in Acton?

Here’s the rough carbon footprint for Acton, circa 2010, taken from the Acton 2020 Plan. What we can do locally is to shrink each of these slices as quickly as possible. To do that we must head toward a fossil fuel–free, clean energy economy. Any investment in new fossil fuel/natural gas infrastructure locks us into using it for decades to come. And continued creation of fossil fuel infrastructure, even at a small, local scale, thwarts our Town and 2020 goals.

A simple carbon action plan would involve the same general steps for every pie slice.

This is our handy carbon-reduction plan. First, we need to reduce energy use. In the case of residential heating and cooling, one way is through air sealing and insulation, which are heavily subsidized by MassSave and available to all homeowners.

The next step is to move away from fossil fuel use. This is accomplished by first switching to systems that use electricity, and then working to source as much of the electricity supply as possible from renewables. And we must do this as quickly as possible.

The best current technology for heating and cooling homes and buildings is the heat pump, which comes in air source and ground source varieties

Here’s what a typical air source heat pump with mini-split installation looks like. It comprises one or more outdoor pump units, and one or more indoor mini-split units, connected with small flexible pipes that carry refrigerant. Town Hall uses this technology in the new wing. You can see the indoor mini-split unit in Conference Room 9.

How do these systems work, and why are they good solutions for heating and cooling?

Heat pumps get most of their energy from the air or ground outside. Refrigeration technology takes advantage of how heat is absorbed when a gas turns to liquid, and how it’s released when a liquid turns back to gas. Even when it’s cold outside, there is still energy in the air, and modern heat pumps can extract energy down to 10 or even 20 degrees below zero, and bring it inside. For those few super-cold days that occasionally happen, supplemental heat is used, such as conventional electric heat. In hot summer weather, the cycle runs in reverse, providing air conditioning nearly twice as efficiently as other systems. The use of energy from the grid is only ⅓ to ¼ of the energy used in the system, because most of the energy comes for free from the air or the ground outside.

We’ve been talking about air source heat pumps. There are other versions:

Ground source heat pumps take advantage of the steady temperatures below the frost line. Though they are even more efficient than air source heat pumps, the higher capital cost of ground source systems has become harder to overcome as air source technology improves.

Heat pump technology can also be used for water heating, which is typically done with an all-indoor system in the basement.

Heat pump heating and cooling systems can use small flexible tubes to transport the refrigerant, eliminating the need to add expensive ductwork.

For retrofits, systems can use existing heating or AC ducts, saving on installation costs, and allowing for a single central heating and cooling unit inside.

So what’s the financial story on air source heat pumps?

Heat pump operating costs are lower than those for any other available option because of the free energy heat pumps get from the local environment. With the incentives that are available to cushion the installation costs, heat pump costs are similar to those for other heating and AC solutions. Thus, they save money as soon as they are turned on. As an upgrade from oil, coal, gas, or propane, heat pumps begin to save money — sometimes called the “payback” point — within a few years. As an upgrade from natural gas, at current gas and electricity prices, payback can take as long as 30 years. The payback period is shorter if the alternative is an expensive repair to an existing heating or AC system.

Here’s the heating part of the operating cost comparison, from a great site called “Efficiency Maine.” You can type in expected prices for various fuels and the site then shows you the expected operating cost. At typical prices, heat pumps are by far the least-expensive option.

Here’s the cooling part of the cost comparison. The key measurement is called the SEER ratio. As this efficiency rating goes up, costs go down. Heat pump systems operate at very high efficiency, with SEER ratings of 20–30 so unless you have a very new AC system, cooling with a heat pump will cost less.

Incentives for heat pump systems are available as rebates from both the state’s Clean Energy Center and from Mass Save. And a remarkable state loan program offers so-called HEAT loans, which are interest-free loans for terms as long as seven years. These can help make some upgrades cash-flow positive fairly quickly. There is also currently a 30% federal tax credit, but we don’t yet know yet whether this will extend into 2017.

You can see our recommendations here, but to summarize: It is especially urgent to prevent new natural gas infrastructure that will lock in fossil fuel use for decades. Clearly, heat pumps are part of the solution for reducing fossil fuel use in meeting Acton’s heating and cooling needs. We recommend that the Board of Selectmen affirm these goals, and via the Town Manager, direct staff and boards to educate homeowners, developers of single and multi-family homes, real estate agents, and the public on heat pump technology, and how and why to adopt it. We recommend that research be done on additional ways for the Town to discourage new natural gas infrastructure. We also recommend that the Selectmen consider tasking an existing or new town entity with creating an overall carbon reduction plan for the Town. And finally, we commend the work the Town has done already, including creation of the Acton Power Choice plan and working with the gas company to coordinate upgrades to their leaky gas infrastructure.

Thank you all for your time and your thoughtfulness on these issues. We look forward to the next part of this dialogue.

Acton Power Choice (APC), which launched in Fall 2017, is Acton’s bulk purchasing program for electricity. Enabled by state legislation, Massachusetts communities can design their own Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) programs to purchase electricity, often saving consumers a bit of money, and allowing municipalities to create electricity supply options that work best for the localities. Local programs often include a “greening up” of the community’s electricity supply with more renewable power than the utilities are legally required to provide.

APC works like this: consumers (residents or businesses) can participate in the program at two levels: Acton Power Choice Standard, which features a rate slightly below that of Eversource Basic’s current rate, and an additional 5% New England–sourced renewable energy, and Acton Power Choice GREEN, which features 100% New England–sourced renewable energy from solar, wind, and low-impact hydropower for a slight premium above APC Standard rates. It’s worth noting that APC’s initial contract with the new supplier, Dynegy, is good for 24 months, through September 2019, whereas Eversource enters into new supply contracts every six months. This accounts for the volatility of utility pricing (which typically rises in the winter); Acton Power Choice participation irons out that volatility over the course of the contract. Consumers who were Eversource Basic customers as of September 2017 were automatically enrolled in the APC Standard option; Green Acton strongly encourages those who can to “opt up” to APC GREEN. Opt up by calling 1.866.220.5696 with your Eversource account number at the ready.

This chart, which offers some sample comparative costs, may be helpful; APC prices are accurate through September 2019, and Eversource prices until January 2018.

Customers are free to opt out of the program at any time.

Eversource will continue to provide delivery and billing services, which means: (1) customers will still call Eversource about any problems, and (2) the monthly bill will still come from Eversource; the difference on the bill is that the supplier will be listed as Dynegy.

Participation in Acton Power Choice GREEN delivers these benefits:
• drives demand that fosters development of more renewable energy sources in New England
• creates local and regional jobs in the fast-growing renewable energy sector
• protects land and water resources through the environmental performance standards this option requires for energy generation
• reduces your (and our community’s) greenhouse gas emissions, which pollute the atmosphere and exacerbate global climate change

Learn more about Acton Power Choice at ActonPowerChoice.com. Questions? Contact the Town’s CCA consultant, Peregrine Energy, at 1.844.379.9933.